Beta

by Reine, SM

  It was the inscription on the inside of his watch. She expected that throwing the words at him would hurt—if not him, then her. Someone had given him that watch. And those weren’t the kinds of words that a professional contact or distant friend would have put on a watch.

  She wanted a reaction out of him. She wanted to find his soft parts.

  Deirdre didn’t expect him to step off of her.

  She gasped for air, vision swimming. She rolled onto all fours and waited until she had enough oxygen to be steady.

  “This isn’t about finding my animal,” Deirdre said to Stark’s booted feet, just inches from her face. “This isn’t about trying to keep me from being weak. You want to control me. That’s all.”

  Stark crushed the fang in his fist, turning it to dust.

  He let it fall from between his fingers. Bone meal snowed to the floorboards. The flakes glimmered and sparkled and swirled, going down, down, down, following Gage’s body to the incinerator, following his soul to the Nether Worlds.

  Deirdre crawled to Stark’s feet. The tooth was dust on her fingertips. Already lost in the cracks of the floor.

  He was lost to her forever.

  “Gage,” she whispered.

  “I don’t want to hear that name again, Beta,” Stark said. “Never again.”

  Jacek was staffing the armory that night. He outfitted Stark and Deirdre with guns, ammunition, and black tactical gear that would allow them to go unseen in the darkness.

  Deirdre was still hazy from all of the lethe that Stark had given her. It was all she could do to stand still, arms extended, and allow Jacek to wrap a ballistic vest around her body. It was heavy with the extra cartridges and magazines that he’d put in each of the pockets.

  Her fingers were white with the powder of Gage’s tooth. Dried blood caked the inside of her arm.

  Men were talking.

  “I’d be able to give you more useful equipment if you told me where you’re going,” Jacek said.

  “I’ve told you exactly what I need. I don’t want recommendations,” Stark said.

  “Let me help, boss. You don’t need some tweaked-out slut watching your back. She’ll get you killed.”

  Deirdre registered that she was meant to be the tweaked-out slut. She let the words slide off of her. Not that she had any other choice. They barely registered through her hot-blooded haze.

  “Stop talking and finish packing our bags,” Stark said. “What happened to your face?”

  Jacek’s cheek was still faintly red from where it had been smashed against the heated range. That injury might have been easy to overlook if she hadn’t also burned away several locks of hair.

  He glared at Deirdre. “Nothing happened.”

  The fact that he didn’t tell Stark about Deirdre’s attack didn’t inspire confidence. Jacek was a whiner, a buzzing fly Deirdre couldn’t swat—with so much ammunition, he should have been shooting his mouth off about everything.

  But he wasn’t. He was saving everything up for later. For a time when he knew he could defeat Deirdre.

  She didn’t care.

  Gage was gone.

  Jacek handed Deirdre a backpack, and she took it from him slowly, watching his eyes for emotion.

  All she saw in him was the alleyway where he’d found her as a viper. She relived the memory so vividly that it felt like it was raining inside the armory. Deirdre could smell traces of the trash in the Dumpsters lined up along the brick wall.

  Who had been that bird shifter that had bailed him out before Deirdre could kill him? There weren’t any avians in the asylum other than Niamh, who couldn’t even become a swan anymore. Deirdre would have remembered seeing someone shift into a bird that size.

  Jacek had to be working with someone who didn’t live in the asylum.

  Maybe he wasn’t talking to Stark because he was a traitor as much as Deirdre was.

  She couldn’t share her thoughts with Stark without explaining why she was so suspicious of Jacek, though. And Jacek knew it. There was a smirk lingering around the cruel shards of his eyes that knew Deirdre was backed into a corner.

  “We’ll be back tomorrow,” Stark said. “You and Niamh are in charge while I’m gone.”

  It was satisfying to watch the smirk drain out of Jacek’s eyes. “Niamh? She’s an idiot.”

  A loud crack.

  Jacek was on the floor. Stark was moving. Punching, stomping, beating him.

  He’d pushed too many buttons. That was usually Deirdre’s job. She didn’t relish seeing someone else’s behavior corrected for once—she didn’t feel much of anything at all besides a warm, comfortable buzz.

  The pounding of flesh on flesh sounded a lot like the faint ticking of Stark’s watch.

  For Ever.

  Gage.

  Deirdre shut her eyes and drifted in time with the rhythm.

  Gage’s body had burned to ash in the incinerator. His tooth had been crushed to dust by Stark’s fist.

  Ashes, dust, and death.

  “Let’s go,” Stark said, seizing her elbow. Her eyes jolted open. She wasn’t sure how long her eyes had been closed. Jacek was still on his knees and there was blood everywhere. Blood on the floor, blood on Stark’s knuckles, blood on Deirdre’s wrist.

  A van was waiting for them outside the asylum.

  They drove into the night.

  —IX—

  Rylie Gresham had assigned a small OPA police force to all state-run schools earlier that week, so they were obviously expecting to be attacked.

  But they still weren’t ready for Stark.

  The team of OPA agents guarding St. Griffith’s Boarding School weren’t watching the right places for attack. They were milling around the gates of the boarding school as technicians wired new security cameras aimed at the trees, rather than buildings in the nearby city. They didn’t see Stark and Deirdre climb into the clock tower. They didn’t see him unpack a sniper rifle. They didn’t see him take aim.

  Three quick gunshots, and Stark handed his sniper rifle to Deirdre. Its barrel was hot.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  It took two minutes of shifter-speed sprinting to exit the clock tower and reach the gates of St. Griffith’s Boarding School. Deirdre only paused long enough to shove the rifle into a duffel bag into the back of their van.

  By the time they reached the school, the agents Stark had shot were dead. The technicians were trying to get through the security they’d freshly installed on the gates. They must have done good work. They were struggling to open their new locks, yanking wires out of the electrical box, yet unable to enter.

  Stark popped off two more shots with a handgun. The technicians dropped where they stood.

  All of the OPA staff members were dead.

  Deirdre drifted behind Stark. The stars were bright in the sky, watching the deaths with cool disinterest. Blood weighed the grass down like dew. The trees framed the sky in a jagged-edged circle.

  She didn’t look where she was walking. She almost tripped over the arm of a dead OPA agent.

  What did it mean that his blank stare didn’t even bother her anymore? Had she become numbed to Stark’s murders, or was it the lethe? She couldn’t tell how much she felt was because of the drugs.

  The sign beside her said “St. Griffith’s Boarding School” in plain metal letters pinned to a sturdy plaster obelisk. It was a functional device without any flourishes or even religious icons. It had clearly been designed to weather difficult winters, guide visitors to the gate, and little else.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked.

  Stark answered her question with another question. “Was this one of your schools?” He knew that Deirdre had been through more than a dozen different schools, group homes, and orphanages while she was still in the youth system. She was surprised that he didn’t have the list by that point. The man seemed to know everything.

  “Yes,” Deirdre said. “It was.” Not one that she’d spent much time in, though. That was wo
rse, in a way. The less time she spent in one facility, the more horrible it had been. St. Griffith’s had been among the most horrible.

  “Then you’ll have no problems navigating it tonight,” Stark said.

  Her stomach flipped.

  “I’m not going in there,” Deirdre said.

  “We are going in there, and you’re going to like it,” Stark said.

  Denying him was about as useful as shouting into a hurricane, so she trudged behind him through the darkness to reach the gates that the technicians had been working on. The mud sucked at the soles of her boots.

  The fence was bigger than Deirdre remembered, tall and electrified, topped by barbed wire that glinted silver in the dim starlight. The fortifications looked as new as the cameras that the OPA had been wiring.

  There were similarly towering walls guarding the Academy at the werewolf sanctuary, but Deirdre had gotten the impression that those walls were intended to protect Rylie’s many foster children. Silver barbed wire could only mean that these defenses were meant to keep the children inside. Like prisoners.

  It looked eerily like the defenses at the detention center.

  A woman was waiting for them on the other side of the gate. She was short and yellow-haired, with olive flesh hardened by too much time in the sun.

  She must have seen Stark sniping the OPA agents. She was pale with fear. But she didn’t run when they approached her.

  “Quickly,” she whispered, cupping the keys to mute them as she quickly unlocked the gate. She wore a yellow rubber dishwashing glove on the hand that she used to touch the metal. It must have been electrified.

  Stark slipped through first, then Deirdre.

  She didn’t recognize the woman who had let them in. It was hard to tell if that was because she was a recent hire or because she’d slipped from Deirdre’s memory. Deirdre had been through so many houses that she only remembered the truly remarkable people—not the highlights so much as the lowlifes, the ones who had abused and denigrated her, spit the word “Omega” into her face.

  “This is my Beta, Deirdre Tombs,” Stark said. “Tombs, this is Blythe Marsten. She’s the groundskeeper for St. Griffith’s Boarding School.”

  Blythe looked much too nervous to care about the introductions. She gave Deirdre a hasty nod and then hurried across the grounds toward the back door.

  Stark and Deirdre followed. The grass was wet on this side of the fence, too. Not with blood, but with dew.

  Maybe it was all blood. The clouds could have bled onto the earth.

  No, that was definitely the lethe talking.

  Deirdre blinked hard, rubbed her eyes, shook her head to clear it. The whole world felt like it was a dream.

  A school from her past, so many dead so quickly. It had to be a dream.

  Yet there was St. Griffith’s looming from the darkness like a tombstone in a misty cemetery, more vivid than any dream she’d had before.

  Unlike many other boarding schools, which inhabited repurposed hospitals, St. Griffith’s had also been a school before Genesis, and probably a nice one at that. The tall windows overlooked a well-kept garden. Ivy scaled the bricks and framed the shuttered windows. There were flowers, colorless in the darkness, and the faint smell of salt water on the wind.

  Deirdre had only attended at St. Griffith’s for two weeks. A personal record.

  If she remembered correctly, she’d been ejected for assaulting a teacher. Deirdre couldn’t recall why she’d attacked that particular teacher, but she was certain that he’d deserved it.

  “All the girls are asleep,” Blythe said softly, unlocking the rear door, “and I’m responsible for patrolling the first floor. We won’t have any trouble getting to the office as long as we’re quiet.”

  Stark nodded his assent.

  Deirdre studied the building as Blythe wrested the door open. The nearby windows were shuttered and barred—another recent addition, like the security cameras. And it was another feature that gave the air of being more like a prison than a warm, nurturing school where children lived.

  Blythe slipped through the hall, leading them through the foyer to an office. The floors were wood, the wallpaper blue. The air smelled of silver and mothballs.

  Magic sparked around the office’s doorframe as they entered. Blythe turned on a single lamp with a green shade, casting the room in a faint glow that deepened the lines on her aged face.

  “Do you have the files?” Stark asked.

  Blythe hefted a box out of the closet and set it on a desk. “This is everything I have. Girls with at least one sister.”

  Deirdre leaned forward to look into the box. Stark had broken into the benefits office to search for gaean families with one mother and two daughters. And now they were at a boarding school looking for girls who had sisters. It couldn’t be coincidental.

  He yanked the box toward him, away from Deirdre. “There are dozens of files here.”

  “We have a lot of girls,” Blythe said. “They send us the sibling groups deliberately because we have the room.”

  He fanned through the pages. “I’ll stay here to look these over. Tombs, take Blythe to wake the kids.”

  Deirdre blinked. “Which ones?”

  “All of them,” Stark said.

  Her jaw dropped.

  There had to be at least five hundred students at the boarding school. What were they going to do to them?

  Deirdre grabbed his arm, lowering her voice to a whisper. “If you tell me that we’re going to kill them, so help me gods—”

  He shook her off. “What kind of man do you think I am?”

  “I think I met you because you compelled me to murder random mundanes on the street,” Deirdre said. “What kind of man do you think I think you are?” She wasn’t certain if the words spilling from her made any sense, nor could she tell what Stark was thinking. His eyebrows creased. The corners of his mouth tugged down.

  “We’re going to release these children,” Stark said.

  That was only fractionally better than mass murder. “Who’s going to take care of them?”

  “Anything is better than here,” Stark said. “Go. Now.”

  Deirdre could hear the edge of compulsion in his voice. She couldn’t hesitate to obey him—not unless she wanted him to discover that she was immune to his powers.

  She turned on her heel and followed Blythe out the door.

  Despite her outward compliance, her mind was whirling.

  Release the children into town? It wasn’t big enough to have many services for gaeans, who tended to cluster in major cities on either coast. There would be virtually no OPA presence at all.

  Probably why Stark had chosen to release kids from that school in particular. They didn’t have as much government help to fall back on.

  But there would be an eventual response. Someone would arrive to corral the children, returning them to St. Griffith’s or relocating them to other facilities. It would be a fleeting victory.

  Releasing them couldn’t be his real goal.

  This was about the files. Those sisters he was trying to find.

  Deirdre pitied anyone that Stark might be trying to hunt down.

  To reach the stairs leading to the bedrooms, Blythe and Deirdre had to go down a long hallway that passed a formal dining room. The door was cracked open. The shine of moonlight on metal caught Deirdre’s attention.

  She stopped in the doorway to look inside. Her heart sank at the sight of the other recent additions to the house, which matched the bars over the windows in many ways.

  There was a pair of shackles bolted to the wall.

  “This way,” Blythe whispered.

  Deirdre ignored her and stepped into the dining room.

  The walls were decorated with heavy velvet drapes, giving the dining room the air of a place that fancy state dinners might be held. It was easy to imagine Rylie entertaining the OPA’s secretary over at the buffet table, laughing politely while twirling a pearl necklace around her forefinger.


  But one of the curtains had been pulled aside to reveal the shackles, as though carelessly brushed aside. Those belonged at no state dinner.

  Deirdre kneeled to run a finger along the edge of the shackle. It burned her skin.

  Silver.

  From her position nearer the floor, she could see underneath the bottom of the curtain. There was another pair of shackles underneath it.

  Deirdre pulled aside the next curtain, and the next. They were concealing restraints all around the room. Dozens of shackles forged from an alloy that could easily restrain shifter children.

  It looked much like Stark’s basement.

  She turned on Blythe, who stood nervously in the doorway.

  “What have you people been doing here?” Deirdre asked.

  “They beat the girls,” Blythe whispered. “I’m not talking about a few switchings when they get into trouble. I mean that they are whipped with silver and chained to these walls. They’re given ‘time outs’ when they’re especially bad.”

  The solitary confinement that Vidya had suffered in flashed through Deirdre’s mind. “Time outs?” she asked, dreading the answer.

  “There are closets,” Blythe said. She left it at that. She didn’t need to say anything else. Deirdre knew exactly what she was talking about.

  Corporal punishment hadn’t been unheard of when Deirdre was in the system. Many foster parents believed it to be the best way to handle unruly shifter children. After all, shifters were naturally violent with each other; kids established social hierarchy with near-constant scuffles.

  But there was a difference between two nine-year-old shifters facing off to see who was at the top of the dog pile and an adult witch hexing children.

  They hadn’t used silver-tipped whips on Deirdre, but she’d been struck with belts, crops—that kind of thing. The foster homes didn’t have quite as much government oversight as the boarding schools.

  That wasn’t to say that life had been good outside the foster homes. It hadn’t been. But most of the abuse Deirdre had sustained came from other kids, not from the adults in the house.